Blogging is one of the most popular activities online these days and the lines are becoming blurred between social media marketing, social bookmarking and traditional blogging.  There are bookmarking sites like Posterous that allow ‘blog’ entries and there has been a suggestion that Facebook incorporate a blog feature as well. I see nothing wrong with this; in fact, the more outlets there are for people to blog, the better.

However, when it comes to a business, blogging for the sake of blogging could be a negative. I can only see two reasons to start a business blog. One is to open communication with customers and the second is to provide SEO benefits, in other words increased traffic.

Customers, or potential customers, won’t hang around or return to your blog if the content is useless to them. Likewise, if search engines see nothing but keyword-stuffed blog posts with links to all your important pages, they won’t give it the authority it needs to build those pages.

It is not difficult to create content that is both useful to your visitors and of value to develop authority. Well written content will, over time, develop natural inbound links. These links are an essential part of that authority development.

Rather than blogging without direction, put together a game plan for your blog. It can work for both visitor satisfaction and SEO purposes. You can then incorporate some of the social blogging platforms that act like funnels, first bringing traffic to your blog then channeling that traffic to your site’s ‘business’ pages. Get it right and everyone wins – get it wrong and you end up blogging for the sake of blogging, with content that is really worthless, and no one wins, least of all your business.